CHINA performed a world’s first double lung transplant on a coronavirus patient in February 29, but observers have called into question the speed at which the organ was procured.
It took only five days to obtain the lungs from a healthy donor from Guizhou Province, and there are no official records of whether the organ was voluntarily offered, or taken by force.
Similarly a few weeks later a hospital in Beijing managed to conduct another successful full lung transplant, acquiring the compatible lungs within three weeks.
The fact that both of these ground breaking procedures happened in the midst of China’s pandemic lockdown has made many question how it was achieved voluntarily, or whether it was nefariously arranged and legalised by coerced signature.
A most profitable trade
The Chinese human organ trade has become an extremely lucrative industry with current prices exceeding $100,000 for a liver transplant and $50,000 for a kidney transplant. But reports by Amnesty International claim victims of the trade have had their bodies cut open for their lungs, cornea and skin also and turned into commodities for sale. Some operations have been performed while the prisoner is still alive, then executed post-extraction. In 2006, former Chinese deputy health minister Huang Jiefu, who is now in charge of overhauling the country’s human organ market said: “Organ transplantation is developing as a tool for hospitals to make money.” So as demand increases internationally, as the world’s population ages and China’s 2.5 million estimated prisoners swells in size, the medical judicial complex of exploiting the death sentence to supply organ markets has acquired many powerful investors with a vested interest to see that it runs unobstructed. In his review of the evidence called, Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China, Mathew P Robertson said: “The ties between the organ transplant system and the official system of healthcare for senior Party and military leaders are extensive and persistent.
“These include personnel ties and institutional affiliations, such as transplant surgeons hold chairmanships on Party healthcare committees, and hospitals that look after the health of Party cadres are on the cutting edge of transplant medicine.”
China’s prison population
As to how many prisoners are executed per year in China is a state secret, but conservative estimates place the tally at between 3,000 and 7,000. The number of prisoners in China is still officially far behind that of the US incarcerated population, but figures do not include the Uighur concentration camps in Xinjiang province.
The China Organ Harvesting Tribunal
Hamid Sabi, Counsel to the China Tribunal, told the UN Human Rights Council in September 2019: “Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century.
“Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph.
“But killing the donor is criminal.
“Government and international bodies must do their duty not only in regard to the possible charge of genocide but also in regard to Crimes Against Humanity, which the tribunal does not consider to be less heinous.”
“It is the legal obligation of UN Member States and the duty of this council to address this criminal conduct.”
China at the centre of an international trade
The speed and efficiency to which Chinese hospitals have been conducting organ transplants since the year 2000 has many observers warning that this can only be achieved by blood testing prisoners and domestic enemies of the state and extracting their organs on demand for a growing market, that serves both national and international patients.
Beijing authorities refute these claims and point to china’s sophisticated blood testing program and large population.
Indirect evidence
To date most evidence to suggest that China is harvesting organs on demand from political prisons, prisoners of conscience and normal criminals is varied and indirect. No defectors have yet emerged with primary documents to suggest the scale of the industry and whether it is fully sanctioned by the state, or possibly conveniently overlooked.
But at the China Tribunal on organ harvesting from prisoners in 2019 Sir Geoffrey Nice QC concluded: “The Tribunal’s members are certain, unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt, that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”
